Recently, vehicles have been incorporating various kinds of electronic equipment. To operate such electronic equipment, a control panel divided into areas, each corresponding to a respective piece of equipment, are disposed in the vicinity of the center of an instrument panel in front of a vehicle interior. The control panel has operation switches arranged thereon.
For some kinds of electronic equipment, semi-automatic operation using electronic components is employed rather than manual operation. Thus, more comfortable driving is provided. On the other hand, in the use of electronic equipment dealing with maps and traffic information represented by a navigation device, operations including selection and determination of information are necessary. For this reason, the number of switches that constitute the input part of these various kinds of electronic equipment may amount to more than one hundred per vehicle, including switches turned on/off on the screen of the navigation device and the like, in some cases.
Switches are concentrated in the vicinity of the center of an instrument panel because a user in the vehicle can easily operate the switches. For this reason, a designer of a vehicle cannot dispose instrumentation for displaying vehicle information freely and a user takes more time to look for the switch corresponding to a desirable function.
To address this problem, it has been proposed to dispose a multi-functional input device for operating various kinds of electronic equipment incorporated into a vehicle in a concentrated manner in a position other than an instrument panel. The Japanese Utility Model Unexamined Publication No. S64-24447 discloses that a trackball device is placed on a floor console between a driver seat and a front passenger seat and switches are placed in the vicinity of the trackball device. Input operations using the trackball device and the switches cause movement of a cursor on a screen and selection of specific processes.
However, in the use of such an input device, visual recognition of the position of a cursor or a pointer on a screen is necessary. With this structure, the user needs to stop the vehicle to operate the input device for traffic safety.